And this week's episode of tiny tours,
we visit one exquisitely crafted timber frame,
tiny home made by one young couple without any prior experience.
But you certainly wouldn't know because Edwin and Clara's tiny house is
absolutely dreamy and it's given them a lifestyle that they've always wanted.
So let's take a tour.
Hii,
my name is Edwin. Hi, my name is Clara and this is our tiny home.
So before we moved into our tiny home, both of us were living in San Diego,
California, full time and going to school and working at the same time.
We realized like I was going to school for engineering accruing,
a lot of debt we're living like kind of a city life, just working all the time,
going to school all the time and the way our future was going to
play out seemed not the best option for us in the sense of,
is there another way to go about this without accruing a bunch of debt on our
life and playing into this mold, that's kind of set up for us.
So the idea of living in nature in a tiny home,
ultimately to reduce our overall debt,
that our life would accrue and be able to have more time to focus on the things
that we wanted to focus on really appealed to us.
So we've been living in this tiny house since January,
right before COVID and the whole world.
Shut down,
and it was convenient to move in here because they told everyone to go into
isolation.
And here we are in the middle of the woods by ourselves in a tiny home.
So it was kind of just perfect timing.
When we decided to take on building a tiny home,
we didn't have any construction experience beforehand, some close family,
friends of ours who lived in this area, uh,
lost their house that took them like 30 years to build. And they built,
they had a two-story beautiful home.
So we agreed to leave San Diego and come help them rebuild their home in
trade, so that they could help us learn how to do carpentry and, uh,
help us build our dream of a tiny home. So.
We built the whole tiny home ourselves.
We had a lot of help from family and friends.
So prior to building this tiny home, I had no experience.
I never held a drill in my life.
And so this whole experience of helping our friends build their house and their
barn was to learn how to build and then exchange we were able to learn how to
build our own tiny home.
And so our expectations going in was that it would take about a year and roughly
overall, it took about three years.
One of the things that's very unique about this home that stands out to a lot of
people is the woodworking. This style of buildings called timber framing. To me,
the idea of a timber framed home that you can wake up to and see these
beautiful beams from wood that we cut down,
we milled and we carved ourself was just such an alluring idea.
We had to go for it process of doing that however was very,
very tedious.
It's not used so much now because of how arduous and time consuming it is.
For instance,
like each of these Clara and I had to like cut shape and then each of them have
a tenon. So we had to cut these tenons into each of these blocks of wood.
And then we had to cut a corresponding pocket into the other block and then fit
them together. Yeah.
It took us just a long time carving and cutting the wood to get to that point.
That that was like half the time of the build almost it felt like was just
making all of the beams and everything,
but it also took longer because we like build our own wood, you know,
plain and shaped it and everything.
So we kind of did everything from the bottom up,
literally all of the wood that you see in this house,
Clara and I milled ourself, and many of the trees we cut down ourselves to.
So in hindsight, I think if we knew how long that was going to take me,
we went in and chose it, but looking at it now we, you know,
I definitely wouldn't do it any differently.
This house costs about $30,000 to build that being said,
we did have access to our own mill,
a friend's mill trees that we could mill. So we saved a lot on lumber,
but overall costs was about 30,000.
We literally wake up and we step outside and we're in nature.
That feeling is amazing.
So that's added a lot of like peace and quality of life to our lives.
So this is the grand room. This is where we practice yoga.
We really wanted to have a space to kind of have walking space,
have people over.
So this was a really big deal for us to have this much floor space in a tiny
house over here, we have our bedroom. So this is the master bed.
We have a ladder that you can pull out that comes onto the bed.
And so that's how we get up into the bed. We love doing coffee in the morning.
So sometimes we'll get our coffee and then curl up, up in the bed.
And that's one of our favorite things to do.
And we have our computer setup as well.
So we love also watching movies, YouTube videos.
So we'll have movie nights up in there. That's really fun too.
And these are our hanging chairs.
We have a couple friends that we love inviting over to hang out.
So it was really important for us to have a space where they felt welcome.
And it didn't feel cramped because in a tiny house it's really easy to happen.
So we wanted extra seating.
So these hanging chairs kind of offer more places for people to be in our house
and really liked that. And these are our drawers.
So this is Edwin's drawer and this is my drawer. So they'd go out pretty,
pretty far. They're about six feet long,
and this is actually more store space than I've ever had in my whole life.
So it's kind of cool that it happened in our tiny house under here is kind of
where we keep miscellaneous stuff that we can't fit in our drawers or just
things that we like to hang. And we have some shoes.
We have our big swamp cooler back here,
and that's really nice in the summertime when it's a hundred degrees out here,
this is our propane heater.
So in the morning we just turn on the propane heater, um,
from this little dial here.
And that's a really nice way to wake up in the morning because it makes the
household toasty.
All right. And over here is our kitchen. So this is, um, the dish rack.
So we store all of our dishes on this rack and it's kind of cool cause it drips
down into the sink. Um,
it's kind of a two in one function and we have some storage up on the top for
fruits and veggies and dishes and for the small space that we have,
we actually have a surprising amount of storage.
So we have all this storage underneath here for extra
cooking utensils. And then in these drawers,
we have all sorts of bulk food items and this is our induction cooktop.
So really easy to clean. We did realize though that it does take a lot of power.
So we added an additional, um, cooking top and oven.
And this has allowed us to kind of manage our power. This is kind of cool.
So we can have,
we have a little tab and this opens up and so one person can be cooking.
The other person can be washing dishes. So that's kind of fun.
And this is our fridge.
So one of the most important things was we did not want a mini fridge cause
we've lived in places where we didn't have very much storage for food.
So having a full size fridge was a very big luxury that we were able
to accommodate in our house. So we were really excited about that.
We really wanted to have a kitchen where both of us could be cooking at the same
time. So we have a couple of features that have allowed us to do that.
And one is, uh,
we have a cutting board that actually fits over the sink and this allows one
person to be cutting vegetables or things like that while the other person is
prepping on the other side. So we have a bar table where we actually eat.
And then we do a lot of food prep here as well.
So initially we were just going to have a window here,
just a picture window,
but Edwin decided that he wanted to build a window wall to open up.
And I had no idea how that was going to work, but he made it work.
We definitely wanted to invite people over so they could sit on the other side
of the bar table and have good conversations and share food that was kind of our
vision. And this window wall has definitely made that possible.
So we'll have people come and they can sit on the outside and then we can all
eat together
This is our bathroom. So we have a pocket door that slides in to the wall.
And so one of the big things we wanted to incorporate in our tiny home was the
shower.
So we rented from apartments that had pretty small and cramped shower.
So we really wanted a nice spacious, luxurious shower situation.
So we had our friend Bernard help us with the shower. He was incredible.
He hand cut all of our tiles for us and he just,
he worked really hard to make the shower really nice. And, um,
over here we have our composting toilet.
So we just got this as a new addition to our house.
We're really excited about it.
The nice part about this is that we can actually open the door and it goes
straight outside. So for muddy coming in after a day of work or adventuring,
we can just come in through the back and just take a shower and then walk into
the house.
And this is our waterfall sink and it just feels really luxurious.
We've never had such a nice sink before. So it was kind of an upgrade for us.
Alrighty. So this is our loft up here. So in order to get in the loft,
we needed to find a system that didn't block too much of our walkway here.
So we invented this little ladder, um,
that slides out from behind the fridge.
We learned this the hard way that we really needed to clip it into this,
a little ring to keep it stabilized. Edwin can tell you more about that.
So basically, um,
we really like having an extra loft because we have friends and family come and
stay, and this is actually a very cozy place. We can,
we fit a California King up there. So it's, um,
pretty plush and we have an octagon window that we can open up for breeze
and we have two other windows on the sides.
So
this is our back deck. We.
Love the outdoors. We love nature.
So creating like a really big open deck space next to the tiny was
important to us. And that's what really makes it come out too. It's like, yeah,
we spend a lot of time outside, you know, just as much,
if not more time outside than inside this trailer that we're on.
So this is a mini trailer and it's a called a solar power trailer,
or that's what we call it. So it's like a trailer with a,
meant to be a deck that you park next to small home, maybe a camping truck,
but the pergola that we built here, the shade is the solar panels.
So you get power from your solar panels here and it pulls it down into your,
um, your batteries and your inverter right in the bench here.
So everything's accessible right here and you've got the charge controller right
here.
So it's kind of an independent setup that can give you a decent amount of power.
Uh, you can just pull it up and park it right next to wherever you're living.
As far as the siding goes, the siding is steel.
We got the steel red roofing,
and then this is actually steel as well too here meant to look like shingles.
The advantage of the steel siding is it's very lightweight to install.
And then also it's very fire resistant,
Clara and I really just love woods so much.
So we kind of kept all our trim and we mixed some wood into the siding
here, even though it's not as fire resistant, because this is a, uh,
a fire heavy area.
We just love the aesthetics of the woods so much that we decided to risk it.
And again, like anytime we had an opportunity to keep our live edge of the wood,
we just left it there. We liked that look,
This is like where we keep all of our lights and activity equipment, you know,
our hiking bags for backpacking paragliding and all that kind of fun stuff that
we like to do. It's,
it's fun kind of like living on our own in the middle of nowhere.
And just again, having that ability to just go out and put something together.
Before we moved out here. We actually Edwin and I attended across the gym.
So we have a rack here where we can do bench press and squatting.
We can change the height of the rig.
So basically we can flip over to the other side and do squats.
So one of the biggest benefits I got felt going tiny is we just need less stuff
to make us happy.
So we focus a lot more on like quality time and less on about accumulating
stuff, because we actually just can't have as much stuff as we used to.
And we go out and we adventure and go on walks and do that kind of stuff a lot
more. There's a lot of challenges that showed up.
Living here mainly because we're living off grid in the middle of the woods.
And we rushed into this like before getting like utilities or anything set up,
like we just got our tiny home here and we.
Got the bare essentials. So we have a 300 watt.
Panels. It gets us by with, you know, basic power. Um,
and then we only have a 250 gallon water tank that I truck in once every,
like two weeks to fill up. So we're always looking to expand,
but those definitely add tedious aspects to our life.
But what gives us solace is the idea that, Oh, like, you know,
once we can afford a well, we'll have a well put in, you know, and then, uh,
once we can afford, you know, more panels, we'll have more panels. So we're,
we're constantly looking to improve and develop the site to make it even more,
uh, functional.
Thanks for watching this week's video tour.
I hope all my fellow Americans out there had a lovely and safe Thanksgiving and
I will see you next week for an all new video.